He gears up, flamethrower in tow, and climbs into the air ducts to go hunt the thing. The blob monster picks off the members of the crew one at a time, until Spike is the only one left. The bulk of the episode plays out pretty predictably. Spike tries to help him with some traditional medicine, but it, uh… it does not go so well. I wonder if that’ll come in handy?) Jet wanders off to the cargo bay to find a blanket and sulk, where he sees a mysterious refrigerator, and is bitten by a mysterious alien blob monster. (The kebab sequence is a pretty cute joke, and it doubles as a convenient way to establish that, hey, they have a flamethrower on board. The episode beings with Faye literally beating the pants off of Jet at poker (see above), while Spike tries to grill kebabs with a flamethrower. The crew hasn’t had any work in weeks, so they’re a little bit broke, and a whole lot stir-crazy.

If you preferred the old format, let me know in the comments and I’ll switch it back for next time.ġ1) In Toys In The Attic, we find the Bebop floating through deep space on its way to Mars. This time I tried to just work the analysis in with the plot summaries. (It might just be a function of how perfectly that first disc peaks in the fifth episode: it feels so planned that it has you grasping at straws for the rest of the series).

The fact that these kinds of aesthetic questions can come up at all shows that Cowboy Bebop is a little smarter than the average bear: when you watch TV on DVD, how often do you spare a moment’s thought for how the episodes are spaced out over the discs? I don’t either, usually… but something about Bebop invites this kind of analysis. And then there’s the last episode on the disc, Bohemian Rhapsody, which feels like they just stuck it in because there was space on the disc. Toys in the Attic, far and away the silliest episode of Cowboy Bebop so far, serves as something like a summary coda for the thematic arc that started in disc two, giving us a chance to catch our breath before Jupiter Jazz, a sprawling two-parter that could have very easily been a stand-alone movie. Alas, Disc three does not feel coherent at ALL. The second disc doesn’t quite have as much of a shape, but it still feels coherent, with all five episodes sharing the same theme (and to a large degree, the same tone). The five episodes on the first disc form a beautiful little arc all on their own. The first two DVDs of Cowboy Bebop feel almost eerily self-contained, considering that the show was produced only a couple of years after DVD technology was even invented. No one wants to talk about the Elephant in the room.

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